Noatak National Preserve Residency Interview with Andrea Spofford (July 15th-August 15th, 2014)

Floatplane return, backcountry trip two.

Bio: Andrea Spofford's essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vela Magazine, Revolver, the Kudzu Review, the Oklahoma Review, Red Paint Hill, Town Creek Poetry, Sugar House Review, and The GulfStream: Poems of the Gulf Coast, among others. Her chapbook, EverythingCombustible, is available from Dancing Girl Press and her chapbook Qikiqtagruk: Almost an Island is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. A native Californian transplanted to the South, Andrea is Poetry Editor for Zone 3 Press.

It is the intersection of person and physical place that characterizes Andrea’s writing overall and the collaboration between science and art—the point where conservation meets poetry—that most interests her. Andrea participated in the Noatak National Preserve residency in northwestern Alaska from July 15th to August 15th, 2014.

Q: Why were you interested in participating at the Noatak National Refuge residency?

A.S. All of my work deals with nature and conservation issues, place specifically. Recently my focus has been on conservation and wilderness, but also how humans find their place in wilderness and how we define wilderness.

Alaska was particularly appealing because it is stereotypically known as this last frontier. Alaska is a wilderness area that I had never been to, and had wanted visit for a very long time.

I planned some Alaska trips, and they kept falling through, so I applied to this program thinking, “Wow, this is right up my alley.”  This is funny because Tama, Jess, and I were all recommended by friends to apply to this program. I read through the listing, and I thought that the Alaska biome sounded really perfect. It sounded like the goals of the residency—celebrating the Wilderness Act while exploring how we define wilderness and how we experience wilderness—seemed to be exactly what I was doing in my poems and essays. I am always trying to find my place in the natural world and reconcile my impact and influence upon it. That’s why I applied and was specifically interested in Alaska. I was very excited when I found out the location because there’s so much historical human interaction within the landscape of the Noatak National Preserve. Getting to see how people interacted with their landscape thousands of years ago was specifically appealing to me.

Q: Why is the intersection of Art and Science so important to you and your work?

Tundra and the onset of fall.

A.S.  Well, first I think scientific language is really interesting and I think there’s a lot of overlap between scientific thought processes and creative thought processes. I like to compare writing a formal poem like a sestina or a sonnet to something that has a very specific format—much like an equation. You want to get to a final product in as few steps as possible, but there’s an element of creativity and thinking outside the box that’s necessary as well.  There’s satisfaction with writing a sestina  that not only successfully follows the pattern but is also very creative.  I think there’s a similar thought process that happens in the sciences and I think there’s a specific part of the brain that both the sciences and the arts explore.

My writing reflects my interests. I read a lot of scientific articles and I like to steal from that language because it is foreign and exciting to me as a writer. I like to take these articles or issues and try to work through them in my poems and essays; at the same time, I like to dissect the language and make it something that I understand and that a layperson reader would understand as well. In that way I feel like a translator, beholden to the original as well as the new product.

I think there is a necessary collaboration between science and art when it comes to wilderness in that there is an element of subliminity experienced by both scientists and artists who devote their lives to wilderness issues. The overlap is great and it just makes sense that there would be collaboration.

 I write so much about environment and place that I see part of my made-up job description as being a translator for that. It seems it’s the same part of the brain that goes into vivid descriptions, and a lot of my writing is very vivid. The most exciting thing for me is to combine my personal experiences of abstractions like place and environment with very physical and concrete sciences.  

An essay I wrote about Alaska can be found in Vela Magazine; it addresses fishing but also ideas like, what is wilderness and how do we interact with wilderness? There are hard facts in the essay but it is also more thoughtful, philosophical, and tends to wander off into tangents—that’s one of the best parts about writing, the ability to wander.

I like learning, and that’s why combining science and art is especially interesting. It’s this opportunity to learn something I’m not familiar with; I mean I’m not a scientist but sometimes I wish I was. This has become a chance for me to explore something different and learn something new.

Q: What are some of your first reactions to the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  It is really large, and it is really, really quiet. Mike and I were the first floatplane trip out.  At camp it was just Mike, me, and the group’s gear. Tama, Jess, and Hannah were meeting us on the second flight. It was so absolutely quite out there.  When Tama, Jess, and Hannah arrived we could hear the plane from miles and miles away because there was literally no other air traffic.

That said, it wasn’t completely silent; we heard some loons and foxes and the sounds of grass and wind. It was quiet compared to the busy sound of Tennessee, almost painfully so.

Q: What do you believe to be a highlight to your time spent in the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  I think the three of us got really lucky in terms of the people we worked with in the Park Service. The Park Service employees in the Western Arctic National Parklands are some of the most generous, kind, intelligent, and wonderful people I have ever met. They went above and beyond to make sure we had an excellent experience so my trips to the backcountry became this magical time.

 In terms of the backcountry, going into the Noatak the first day, that rush of silence and how big Alaska actually is was amazing.

On the Nigu River, we got to participate in archaeological surveys. The day we dug exploratory 50 x 50 centimeter squares was such a great opportunity. In the pit Hannah and I dug, Hannah found an almost perfect atl-atl spearhead that was dated to about 4000 years old. The next day they found datable charcoal in the same pit. That time, at that place, felt like we were doing real archaeology. We were getting to learn so much about the people that worked with and lived upon the landscape thousands and thousands of years ago.

Prepping fireweed blossoms for syrup.

In town there was a day when we made fireweed syrup. We got up early, and Tama and I went with Norma Booth and Frank Hays to collect blossoms. Together we spent all day just making fireweed syrup and taste-testing it. Later, Mike and Ann and Levi came over for lunch.  It turned into this all day, hanging out in Kotzebue experience.

That night everyone came over to our house and I made the salmon I caught the day before. I caught my salmon off the seawall and it weighed about fifteen pounds after it was cleaned—it was a huge salmon and my fishing pole was broken after! It was just this enormous fish, and it didn't even fit on the cookie sheet we put it on; it was bent over in the oven.

All the kids in Kotzebue were so excited when I caught that fish. I think partially because I’m a girl and I caught a really big fish, but also because I was a visitor and I caught a really big fish.  They were giving me directions on how to reel it in because I had never used a snagger before and I didn’t even bring a knife. I mean, we weren’t planning on going fishing. It was just a group of us walking home and we decided to throw a line in and see. Once I had the fish pulled up the boat ramp, one of the boys killed the fish for me and cleaned it too.  The kid’s father said, “So next time you’ll bring a knife.”

There was also a day at the first backcountry location when we sort of took the day off to explore, read poetry, and fish. That day we caught trout. We had six trout when all was said and done. We caught them on a homemade fly. I had a lure and the fish weren’t biting so Hannah made a fly from materials from the surrounding environment. We all started catching fish with the fly that Hannah made—we were fly fishing with a spinning reel, which is pretty funny.  

This was totally the perfect residency and I kept thinking, can it get anymore perfect?

Q: Did the residency make any impact on the way you view the natural world, or facilitate ideas for future work?

 A.S. In terms of focus, my writing the past couple of years has really taken more of environmental direction. I just finished my Ph.D. in the beginning of the summer and my major areas of study were American literature and Environmental Poetics. I’m really interested in early American literature and contemporary writing about environment. I think there is a certain bigness to wilderness, and certain people are drawn to wilderness because of that. I think I’m really drawn to wilderness and gravitate toward people who are drawn to wilderness for that same reason.

Backcountry camp.

Writing about wilderness is just one of those things that is so large it is hard to put into words. I think this residency really influenced my writing. It helped me focus my ideas even more than they have been in the past. It gave me a subject that is really unique—wild in a lot of ways—but also a place people have been interacting with for a long time. There is not a separation from people and wilderness in Alaska; there are people interacting with their landscape. Ideas of ownership are really different in Alaska and I think that made me reconsider how I think about wilderness.  

Q: As an artist do you feel like you influenced the scientist that you worked with?

A.S. When we were in the backcountry we worked with Michael Holt who is the lead archaeologist and head of cultural resources as well as his assistant, Hannah Atkinson.  Having us around—the three of us who are not archaeologists—asked Mike and Hannah to explain things they may not have explained if they had been with a team of other archaeologists. I noticed the small details of things, but the types of rocks and the stories those rocks told were not as apparent to me as they are to Mike. I think the artists’ presence really asked Mike and Hannah to express these things. I think the thing they really had in common with the three of us is that we are all storytellers.  Jess tells stories through visual art, Tama tells stories though her photography, and I tell stories with my writing. Mike especially is a storyteller—a huge part of his job is telling stories about the way people interacted and experienced their landscape. I think Mike was excited to have us there; he’s so earnest and so invested in his resource and so willing to share. I think that quality can be rare.

Stone tools.

I think there is a question, especially in archaeology, about what we present to the public and what we hide away. I think when we present something to the public a lot of times the public wants to destroy it. But if we don’t present it to the public they don’t know that they should care about it; it’s a catch-22. Because they were so willing to share, I think Mike and Hannah took on the role of teacher more than they would have otherwise. I like to think that maybe they experienced the backcountry a little differently, not just from the lens of an anthropologist, but also from the lens of a writer, photographer, and visual artist.

I think we realized we were telling similar stories in different ways. We don’t do exactly the same thing but there is a lot of overlap in our goals and in what we value. 

Q: What were some of the beneficial outcomes of your experience?

A.S. I think the amount of work I produced is a hugely beneficial outcome. There’s so much more to say! I think experiencing this place, a place most people don’t get the opportunity to experience, was hugely beneficial to my creative process as well.  I also think that getting to work with Tama and Jess was fantastic. I don’t get to work with people who are visual artists very frequently, which is a shame. I think there should definitely be more collaboration across mediums and I really admire what both of them do. Just seeing and getting to hear about things from their perspective and observing what they noticed compared to what I noticed became very eye-opening. Tama is a writer (in addition to being a photographer) so I feel like she and I really bonded; we will always have this shared experience.

I also think getting to work with the Park Service was great.  Like I said earlier, everyone we encountered was dedicated, generous, and excited to share—that is really refreshing. The level of care for these parks demonstrated was admirable. 

"Walk it Down" and Vela Magazine

by Andrea Spofford


As I'm writing an "update" post--where I've been and what I've been doing after Alaska--I wanted to take a moment and share an essay I wrote about fishing in the Kotzebue Sound. Vela Magazine (an excellent magazine that publishes "creative nonfiction inspired by travel, written by women") was gracious enough to publish my work.

If you have ten minutes take a moment to check it out.

Happy, happy travels.

When Leaving

 by Andrea Spofford

Noatak National Preserve

you must always love this place, as deeply as you love yourself and all others 

When I leave a place I love I go through a period of sadness, a moment of mourning for the loss of a beloved, the familiarity of a landscape pulled from me as if by sudden death, or the way of disappearance. The Alaskan arctic where I spent the last month is not gone, so this sadness of leaving has not been as deep as it could have been. This place is still very present for me—as present as the promise of an Arctic Oven and a camping trip across a frozen sound.

Nigu River Sunset

I have dreamed about Alaska for seven years but I had no idea that Alaska could be this largeness of experience: a terrain of tundra and rolling muskeg, a boreal forest, a herd of muskoxen circling a lone baby as we fly over in a float plane, a large blond grizzly bear raising a paw, an expansive scattering of lithics along river shores, the saltwater taste of fermented walrus, the deep red of frozen caribou, a dog in war-paint, a polar bear researcher and her artist husband, a woman from Arizona sorting fireweed blossoms, her partner simmering the syrup, an archaeologist with a quick smile, a town of generosity full with children, three a.m. fishing, a trip to Cemetery Hill to hunt for the aurora borealis, and a vibrant, expansive day lit sky that darkens mid-August and reveals only the brightest stars in partial light—this is only a small piece of Alaska. This place is more than all of this; it is an outdoor museum, a testament not to “untrammeled land” but to the relationship between humanity and landscape, an incomprehensible largeness, like opening your arms atop a mountain, the wind buffering around you, closing your eyes to balance and just standing there in darkness, in flight.

Tundra Along the Nigu River

Before we leave Alaska we go on one more trip into an area that runs along the edges of the Noatak National Preserve. We fly close to the Kobuk Dunes, farther east than our first excursion to the base of the Brooks Range. We camp along the Nigu River, a north-flowing river that runs through the Brooks and down the North Slope. We map sites and dig exploratory 50cm by 50cm square pits, shaving layer after layer of soil and screening each batch as we go. We find flakes and stone tools and Hannah finds a nearly perfect atlatl spearhead that dates back four to five thousand years. She beams.

Atlatl Spearhead

Everywhere we go we see evidence of human life and subsistence—tools and flakes, stone-cut caribou bones, game drive lines, cairns atop gravel, tent circles, and even shotgun shells. The people who lived and hunted here did not just survive—they thrived in a climate of sub-zero temperatures and swarms of mosquitoes. One night on the Nigu we take the canoe into the lake. Mike paddles and I steer. We pull ashore near an archeological site more recent than others we have seen. The tent site here is square. Mike, Jess, and I walk up the hill to the site and Tama stays in the boat with the shotgun—she photographs the bank, the way the grass emerges from the water far from the shore, the water so clear stones are visible through it.

Fall Color Changes

The magnitude of this place is biblical in proportion. One night at the visitor’s center Tama and I watch a film about a man who walked alone across the Brooks Range, beginning at the Gates of the Arctic and ending at the mouth of the Noatak River. We watch a film about the Noatak Wilderness itself. We gather fireweed and blueberries, akpik, or cloud berries, or salmon berries. We walk the loop road outside of town. In one of the films a scientist says that Alaska is where he will take his grandchildren. See, he says, this is wilderness; this is what God made.

Alaska is the sky that night on Cemetery Hill, the circle of darkness dotted with bright stars and haloed by gray light, the sun set fully but still lingering along the edges. Alaska is not the rosy-fingered dawn of Homer—the sunsets, not sunrises, are vibrant pink and pulsing. Alaska is, instead, that place in the middle of the sky, the coldness of fall approaching and fogging breaths, the space of electricity not mechanical but human, not entirely wild but impossible to contain—the wolf that runs for miles and the fox that follows close at hand.

While I am figuring out Alaska for myself, what part I have taken and what part I have left, I do know that I will bring my children to this place. I will say: See, this is the landscape. This is the sky in all clearness; this is the ground in all brightness. Those are mountains. This is silence. This is where your ancestors lived, where they slept, where they ate. This place is you, the core of you, and you must always love this place, as deeply as you love yourself and all others. 

Noatak National Preserve

Noatak Sunset

Flying Back to Kotzebue; Noatak National Preserve

Noatak National Preserve

Noatak National Preserve

Kotzebue, Alaska

The Peace of Wild Things

by Andrea Spofford

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

Brooks Mountain Range

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come to the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

***

Beach Bonfire

In the Noatak Wilderness the sun and moon rise at the same time, two bodies circling each other as a lasso around the Brooks Mountain Range to the North, and the Chukchi Sea to the Southwest. An Arctic sunset is but a stopping point--the sun moves behind the mountains and waits, darkened slightly but not disappearing, the gray light I've become accustomed to dimming as it becomes the night sky. The stars here are day-blind, their light still pulsing above us but invisible in their sparseness, the only sign of night the moon itself. We built a fire to cook and smoke the fish we caught and stoked it with driftwood collected at each ice line--the place in the sand and stones where detritus is pushed upward by ice each winter. On the banks of this lake there were at least three distinct lines, markers of winter during a time of warmth. The surrounding lakes, too, those of sunken and melting permafrost, those were markers as well, though one morning we woke up so cold nobody wanted to leave their tent.

Mike and I arrived at the lake first and the quiet, after our float plane took off again, was immense. It was almost a vacuum of silence, an ambivalent lack of noise broken soon by the calls of loons. We could hear the engine of the plane for awhile and then nothing but the wind and loons in the distance, those hermitic birds that are difficult to see and whose eggs you'll find first, before you see the birds themselves. Their calls sound mournful, but I hesitate to personify them that way. This quiet--even with the loons, the foxes speaking to one another, the wind, and the outflow of water in the distance--is complete. Days later I walked up the hill while Mike and I waited to be picked up and only a few feet beyond the bear fence the music we were listening to got quieter; only a few feet further and I couldn't hear it at all. There were no distant motors, or pile-drivers, or construction noises; no people talking, doors slamming, or cars starting; there were no creaking houses, or buzzing streetlights, or helicopters, or even planes, and all of that is a good thing--this was the most silent place I have ever been. 

Kotzebue Sound

After I have been outside I worry even more about natural things, and I understand the despair that Berry talks about. We need these silent places so that we can "rest in the grace of the world," and we need to protect this grace. When we got back to town we had dinner with a most excellent and interesting group of people--social workers, anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, soil scientists, teachers, and more--and this was good too. At midnight we took a boat ride across the sound and as we pushed the boat into the water, there was almost no horizon line--the sky and water met seamlessly. The moon was rising as the sun was setting and both would soon circle around us. The next morning we picked blueberries for hours and as I lay in the tundra and filled my bucket with berries, I realized how free I am. I am thankful for these small moments, these days that blur the line between sea and sky.

wildlife encounters, Kotzebue Alaska

By Jessica Segall

Tomorrow is the day we head out into the "wild".  After a week of sealing tents, stuffing bear barrels, bear safety training and the hospitality of the National Parks Service and Kotzebue residents, we will take the float plane out to Noatak National Preserve.  Today's trip up the Noatak River was delayed by a seizing outboard engine.  However, wildlife encounters were plenty, including beluga whale, fermented walrus, bearded seal, caribou, dried pike and a foraged, wild berry jam all present at the dinner table.  As a pescatarian for 25 years, I hesitated, but tasted everything, to the palate's delight.

Noatak Wilderness Science and Art Collaboration

By Peggy Lawless

The Aldo & Leonardo art-science collaboration at Noatak National Preserve began July 15. Three artists (Tama Baldwin, Jessica Segall, and Andrea Spofford) will assist archaeologist Michael Holt in surveying an important prehistoric site.



Nan Christianson, Hannah Atkinson, Frank Hays, Willie Goodwin,
Andrea Spofford, Jessica Segall, Tama Baldwin, Mike Holt

Empiricism & Its Discontents

By Tama Baldwin


--“The proofs fatigue the truth.”  Georges Braque

dogs of kotzebue, # 1

These days leading up to our departure for the Brooks Range are deliciously long, the sun lassoing our heads most of the hours of the clock until our sense of ourselves in time is mostly lost.  I have to force myself to wind down and turn in because something in the body seems to love the light so much it rises and rises into it with no sense of an ending.  We are all feeling a little like those flowers you see every where down south in the big cities of Anchorage and Fairbanks:  all those  buckets and busted up canoes packed bow to stern with snap dragons and lobelia and dahlias and petunias blowing themselves up in little color bombs.  It would be interesting to know how the hormonal processes of those flowers are altered by the absence of darkness—it’s a desperate race to be sure, to flourish as fast as possible before the onset of winter.  In Kotzebue the horticultural predilections of people of European descent give way to the aesthetics of the hunter-gatherer.  Though I’ve seen more than one citizen with a weed whacker over their shoulders heading to some location I’ve yet to uncover the standard practice here is laissez faire when it comes to things like landscaping and lawns, which is an aesthetic I very much prefer.  I would never get away with it in Iowa City, but I’d love to let the yard surrounding my house retreat to its prairie origins just as here the tundra continues to assert itself despite the assaults of graders and pavers and four wheelers and pickup trucks.  I like the tangle of fireweed and bluebells and bear grass and the clusters of daisies that are nothing less than prolific in springing from the most distressed scabs of earth.  I love the dogs that guard the front of so many of the houses, the lot of them incredibly noble in demeanor:  they are lords each over their domains—just as the ravens outside our little red house choked in shrub willows completely own the piles of pipe and Northland storage containers stacked in a lot across the road.

Maybe I am giving the light  more credit than it deserves.  Perhaps the inspiration that keeps me up past my normal bedtime stems from the incredible welcome we’ve received.  Every one involved in this project, from the representatives of the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado Art Ranch believe utterly in this collaboration we are about to undertake in what the park service swears has been scientifically proven to be—botanically speaking—a “pristine wilderness.”  The conversations around the dinner table have been dense and vibrant, as packed with laughter as debate.  It occurs to me that despite the presence of the twin sirens of the wired world—internet and TV--  the art of conversation is still alive and well in Kotzebue.  Tonight the focus swerved toward one of my favorite topics—how we know what we think we know about the world—and more importantly a debate about the merits of so-called “anecdotal evidence” versus  “empirical proof.”  

The push-pull between the anecdotal and the empirical plays out all the time here.  When the road to the Red Dog Mine 90 miles north of Kotzebue was finished and trucks began to roll their loads of zinc to the Chukchi Sea the caribou who migrate along the coast were affected by the overt presence of human industry.  Those in favor of the mine argued, anecdotally, that there was little to no impact, but the scientists who radio collared and tracked the caribou noted that many of the animals shied away from crossing the road, delaying their southward passage for almost 40 days--a disruption that was nearly catastrophic both for the animals and  hunters alike.  True subsistence existence is already all but impossible now with the changes wrought by climate change and the incursion of mining and drilling, and the Red Dog Mine clearly has only made things worse in this regard.  The caribou who failed to cross  the road would not survive the winter, and those who finally dared to cross after over a month of delay had to burn down their winter fat hurrying to catch up with the rest of the migration.  Those in favor of the mine now say the trucks stop when the drivers see the caribou—thus problem solved—but anecdotes like that sound just a little cartoonishly too easy, and so  I am eager to know what the scientists still studying the issue will have to say when they finish tabulating this year’s migration patterns and numbers. 

The part of the Brooks Range where we are heading next week is rich with cultural history, and each day as we survey looking for new archeological sites  and assessing the condition of existing digs we will be confronted with how we know what we know about the people who left evidence of their lives behind.  No life can be perfectly reconstructed and interpreted from the fragments, and the longer the delay between the social reality of the artifact and the social reality of its interpreter the likelier it is that the story of the object and the person who made it will be lost to time.  The sad truth is that the most durable of things are often the most mundane—bones and stone, mostly, and these tell a story of gut level survival which while important says little to nothing about the interior life of the people who once lived here.  Their descendants, though, have plenty of insight to offer, almost all of it by way of story.  The traditions are oral, of course, and thus  when the empiricist arrives demanding something tangible--proof that what the elder claims was actually how things were--our ability to fill in the gaps or  to flesh out the whole story tends to suffer.   I love the empiricists and their need for their kinds of truths--though maybe it would be better if we could figure out a way for the quantifier to meet the dreamer halfway.   There is always a bead of truth in every story, no matter how speculative, no matter how freewheeling in relation to material reality.  Even lies open a window, albeit obliquely, into a shared reality.  In the mid 19th Century the Inupiat prophet Maniilaq foretold the arrival of Europeans  in far northwestern Alaska and of boats powered by fire and boats that could fly.  The last of his prophecies have not yet come to pass, but in this age of climate change they are starting to feel less and less like fantasy.  The village of Ambler is not yet a teeming metropolis--though with the on-going invasion of Canadian mining interests in this part of the United States it now seems plausible.  I don't want to be there though the day the whale he prophesied arrives that far up the Kobuk River--be it by tsunami or by flooding. 

wing'd boat

Wilderness Preparation: Noatak National Preserve

By Andrea Spofford

"To Think of Time" by Walt Whitman

10.

Pleasantly and well-suited I walk, 

Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good, 

The whole universe indicates that it is good, 

The past and the present indicate that it is good. 

How beautiful and perfect are the animals! 

How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it! 

What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just

     as perfect, 

The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable 

     fluids are perfect; 

Slowly and surely they have pass'd on to this, and slowly and surely 

     they yet pass on.

***

These weeks leading up to the Noatak residency have been hectic; I have filed my dissertation, set up a significant move, relocated, driven over 50 hours, and been in six states, only to relocate again when I return from Alaska to begin a new job that is, in so many ways, a dream come true. Timing, right now, is beautiful. As I look at the mountain of gear that awaits me and as I run through my checklist one, or two, or three last times, I keep coming back to the purpose of this trip, the adventure of Alaska and the experience of the wilderness. For me, this is the best timing for the best opportunity. Alaska is a chance to explore wilderness that I am a stranger to, a place that I have very literally dreamed about for the past seven years. Like Whitman, I want to walk as well-suited as possible, enjoying the infinite goodness of simply being outside. 

     What is so unique about this opportunity is the very point where art--in my case, writing--meets the scientific. I've always felt a certain kinship with science, the poetry of taxonomies and the ways that nature and writing are so infinitely connected, a relationship that I see in the earliest American writers and a relationship that became an ecstatic love and tabulation of natural richness. This includes the writing of John Smith and moves forward to the exuberance of Walt Whitman; as the United States developed, so too did this niche of writing about nature, for all its goodness and complication. I think what is so important about this trip, from my perspective, and from the perspective of my writing, is to explore that place of origin, the delight in the wild and natural that is sometimes lost in contemporary writing and the place where I feel so at home. 

     This is why I am so pleased and grateful and excited about Alaska; while there we are going to present our work at the Kotzebue community center, assist with research at an archaeological dig site in the Brooks Mountain Range, and wander around Kotzebue itself, a 9000 year old settlement located 26 miles north of the Arctic Circle. We'll be in almost 24 hours of daylight. My mountain of gear includes a fishing rod and reel (for the hopeful catching of dolly varden and rainbow trout), a fishing license, chemical hand warmers, hats, rain gear, my well-traveled tent, and a host of other things--all of which I need to fit into as few bags as possible. I've seen a lot of America and will soon trade nesting sea birds and the Laguna Madre in south Texas for the tundra of northwestern Alaska, switching out sandals for Xtratufs. I can only try to tell you how wonderful this is, this contrast of ecosystems and environments. I can't say now what will come from this trip, but that's the best part. As Whitman says, "What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad/is just as perfect."

What I'm packing (the partial assembly):

Where I'm coming from: